


The Dreaming of a Wild Rover

by Like_a_Hurricane



Series: Pernicious Prompting [14]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, dream walking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-06
Updated: 2013-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-07 17:01:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/750896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Like_a_Hurricane/pseuds/Like_a_Hurricane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki’s mind wanders, in self-defense, as far as possible from the body and mind-scape he lives in, while Asgard burns away the remaining influence of the tesseract and its reality-distorting visions. He wanders near and far, and runs out of places that can distract him from the pain. Until he tried, on a whim, visiting familiar persons in Midgard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dreaming of a Wild Rover

**Author's Note:**

> So originally this was going to be another small section for _Pernicious Petite_ , but I got a little carried away. This is for [misakikaito](http://misakikaito.tumblr.com/) whose prompt was "Dream Walking" and [wrecked-anon](http://wrecked-anon.tumblr.com/) whose prompt was "grounded".

It was a long walk from Asgard to earth, either by the crooked paths Loki was prone to wandering when awake, or by the still trickier and more dangerous routes through the astral plane. These days, he could only take the latter option, imprisoned as he was. He spent more and more of his time wandering, dangerous though it was.

Necessary though it may be for him to revisit his body and maintain his connection to it, every return brought with it new discomfort, as Odin struggled to burn the last traces of the tesseract’s and Thanos’ hooks buried deep in his mind, and free his lost son of the liar’s palace he’d built all-too-well. Well enough to trap himself beneath it, the fires of reality distortion tempering it into something too strong, too rooted, for him to extricate. Loki had saved most of himself from distortion of perception, but not without great cost: one that he was still paying.

At least now, he could wander. The same could not be said of the cage of lies and madness anchored within his own mindscape on this plane. While it burned and broke, Loki could escape for a time, and distance himself from the fires and the sounds of his own screams.

He had initially escaped to Helheim, and spent time in his daughter’s dreams. She had welcomed him, and teased him, and said that she had missed him, and worried for him. Hel kissed his brow, each time, before he left her dreams, and her cool lips helped him forget for a few blissful seconds about the sensation of fire ever-lurking behind, and around the edges, of his thoughts. Goddess of death as she was, mercy came more naturally to her than it ever had to her father.

With time, Loki began to try and venture farther still, to places still more distracting. He had not initially thought much of Midgard, but curiosity drove him to it. Expecting to be too bored, and to be able to dismiss the place easily enough, Loki instead found rather unfairly interesting distractions in the forms of his newest enemies and pawns: the Avengers.

 

~~

 

He had visited the assassin first. Her dreams were as cold and dark as Hel's. She was more aware of him than she had any right to be.

“You would do well to get out of my mind.”

“I am not in your mind. I’m no telepath.”

Natasha scrutinized him, then. They were in a cell somewhere deep underground. She was being held captive. It did not seem to bother her overmuch; she must be used to it, and even more used to escaping from it. “And if I believe that?”

Loki only shrugged. “I am not here to cause harm unless I grow too bored and you seem entertaining to harm.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’ve injured telepaths. Dream-walkers can’t be too different.”

“You are more interesting when you feel you have plenty of time, no imminent threat encroaching. Your lies show more art, at such times,” Loki said.

“Why are you here?”

“Why are you?”

“You don’t belong here.”

“I belong precisely nowhere, so I hardly see how that’s relevant.”

The world shifted around them.

Loki found himself in chains, injured as he’d been after the battle in New York, though his gag was missing. He was, however, chained to a familiar seat of interrogation. Natasha stood by the door. She hardly seemed to have moved, compared to the rest of the world around her, so steady was her stare. “Now this is familiar,” the trickster mused.

“I got some questions answered, but not all, last time we were here.” She raised an eyebrow, and suddenly a knock came to the door. She nodded toward it. “He got more, though, didn’t he? When he interrupted? Was it his arrogance, or his banter?”

Loki knew who she meant. He tisked quietly, and shrugged out of all chains and manacles with seemingly no effort, rising to his feet, aware of how sharply the assassin was watching him. “Perhaps both, as those qualities did indeed make him entertaining, but for the most par, Stark simply asked far better questions,” said the god of lies. Then he vanished.

 

~~

 

Next visit was far trickier, for the mind doing the dreaming was a tangle of two creatures, all twisted together, dreaming separately for now; although Loki suspected that this was not always the case.

Loki made no attempts to enter the Hulk’s dreams. As it was, he had to try very hard to slip past the Hulk’s awareness to reach Bruce Banner’s more lucid and slightly less turbulent dreamscape. The man dreamt less personally than many, likely because he was not very deeply asleep. Finding Bruce never happened. There was only a whirlwind of data, theories crashing together, forming new and brilliant forms.

The trickster let himself walk through it all, occasionally reaching out to touch, changing an idea here and there. Bruce Banner truly was a genius, he discovered: utterly brilliant, with an understanding of the universe around him that rivaled some mages of Alfheim and Asgard Loki had known long ago.

It had been soothing, the quiet sneaking and the absorption of knowledge both.

That was what inspired Loki, on his next visit to Midgard, to enter the dreams of the Avengers’ other resident genius.

 

~~

 

Tony Stark was prone, it seemed, to nightmares.

Loki was caught moderately off-guard by it, though by the standards of nightmares this one was sedate. He found Tony Stark deep within a cave, manipulating elements and energies manually, pulling light from the dark. Loki stood and watched as all the lights in the cave flickered and went out entirely, and a device not unlike the one that had stopped his scepter and prevented it from sinking tendrils of control into Tony Stark’s heart, flickered to life like a living, breathing thing.

Able to hear and feel the hum of it, standing in front of the table in the dark, Loki determined that it was definitely a power-source, and an impressive one. By the light of it, he could see a mess of wires and bandages on the inventor’s chest, leading to a large block that was a decidedly inferior, but more common Midgardian power source.

“I can’t figure out what you’re doing here,” Tony said gravely.

“Curiosity.”

“About?”

“Everything.”

Tony stared up, acknowledging Loki’s existence for the first time since New York.

As happens in dreams, the world skipped ahead, moving around them. Another figure appeared, whom Tony called Yinsen, and who installed the arc reactor in the mad inventor’s chest to power... something. Something other than a metal suit, though as the trickster god watched, one of those came into play, too. Yinsen’s death smeared bloody across the dreamscape and Loki flinched. Then there was fire, and vengeance, and flight. Then Tony crashed.

“An elecromagnet,” Loki said, and the dream around them stilled. He’d only just realized what the reactor must be powering.

Tony was buried up to his neck in sand and the wreckage of his armor. Then it shifted just for a moment, and he was laying there in an expensive suit, blood seeping up from under his bulletproof vest. “Yeah. Keeps shrapnel out.”

Then it was sand and armor again.

Loki proffered a hand.

Looking up at him warily, Tony reached up and took it, letting the god help pull him to his feet. “Still curious?”

The trickster realized he’d forgotten all about the pain of fires burning around his own far-stretched thoughts, where they kept him anchored and bound back to his own body, his own mindscape. He hadn’t thought of it once, since he’d stepped into this man’s dreams. Even now it was a passing thought _it’s missing_ that hardly lasted long enough for him to recall what it was that was missing. “Yes,” he said, most of his focus still on the inventor.

“What about?”

“Everything.”

Tony snorted, half-smiling, even though he looked battered and bloody. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

Loki blinked at that, unsure entirely what to make of it. Perhaps the inventor wasn’t even seeing him as _Loki_ here; that was a common problem in dreams that contained so many, and such volatile memories of the past. He placed a hand over the arc reactor in Tony’s chest, watched it change shape and brightness, feeling a sensation like poison being replaced with something fresher and more vibrant under his hands.

The desert vanished, and they now stood in Tony Stark’s ruined penthouse, as it had been right after the battle of New York.

Sparing a glance for the crater that the Hulk had made, using Loki’s own body as a flail, the trickster winced only a little. He stopped touching the inventor.

“You’re pretty tough to’ve even survived that. I don’t know what’s in the water up there in Asgard, but I want some.” He shot Loki a look. “You’re only mostly from there, though, right? Adopted and all?”

The trickster’s eyes narrowed. “That is no business of yours.”

“You tried to take over my head with mind control, and your brother warned all of us that you can dream-walk. He warned us right after we caught you. If you’d so much as closed your eyes too long, people had orders to harass you until you looked a bit more lively,” Tony said. “I learned a few newer lucid dreaming tricks, since then. I already had the basic down, anyway, but there are some dreams a bit more resistant to change than others.” He raised an eyebrow. “So you cropping up was a bit of a giveaway, princess.”

The god of mischief eyed the inventor more shrewdly, at that. “This is you reasserting control, then.”

Tony nodded. “I figured out a long time ago that I can’t stop or alter much of that last dream, but I can speed it up, sometimes, if I can managed to convince myself it really is a dream.”

“Infrequent?”

“You answer my questions first, Iago.”

“Iago?”

“Shakespeare reference. You’d like Shakespeare, I think.”

“I have heard the name. He is a... playwright?”

“You guys have theater in Asgard?”

“Of course we do. What sort of barbarians do you take us for?”

“The sort who inspired vikings.”

Loki smirked a little. “Fair enough.”

“Why are you here?”

“Curiosity.”

“And?”

“I need another reason?”

“Thor said we wouldn’t have to worry about you showing up in our dreams because of how fucked up making that long of a trip is, from your little prison cell to earth, purely on your weird dreamy level-”

“The astral plane.”

“Oh, that thing? Strange keeps mentioning it, and ever time, I just want to shoot him with something until he stops being vague and mystical.” He shook his head. “The point is, even _Thor_ knew that it would be a dangerous sort of thing for you to do just to even get here, before even getting into anyone’s dreams, but getting where you could reach them. So I don’t think curiosity is the only reason you’re here.”

Loki considered. He gave thought to the cave, to the inside of his own mind, to the fires and the pain––he had started to forget what it was like to not have pain creeping in at the edges of his awareness, all the time, always barely-suppressed by distance and his own force of will. “Would you like a crash course in some fundamental basics of the astral plane?”

Tony considered. “Only if I still get my other question answered.”

With that, Loki reached out and took over control of their surroundings. “Explaining the one goes a long way to answering the other. Let’s start with the basics of your mindscape.”

 

~~

 

Tony Stark awoke the next morning still tired, feeling like he’d run several miles and only stopped because he’d been hit by a truck.

He called Dr. Strange after his second cup of coffee.

“Hey. So. Astral plane. Dream-walkers. I need some answers. Let’s have lunch.”

 

~~

 

Doctor Steven Strange had listened to his explanation of Loki’s little dream-walking lesson in calm silence until the very end.

“The bastard still didn’t answer my question, either.”

“I believe he may have,” Steven said, sounding a bit strangled.

“Eh?”

“The construct he described, the liars’ palace, is a dangerous one for a mage to use for too long, particularly after any sort of traumatic events,” Strange said slowly. “I’ve read Loki’s files, as I have a vested interest in keeping tabs on other powerful mages intent on potentially harming the planet. According to Thor, Loki was unaware of his ‘adopted’ nature until shortly before the incident with the bi-frost which sent him tumbling into the void which drew him eventually to Thanos and the Chitauri. He then told you, quite off-handedly, that shortly after his crash-landing he constructed an elaborate liars’ palace to hide behind, in order to survive dealings with Thanos.”

“And?”

“Magic of his sort, and mine, relies on force of will quite heavily,” Strange said. “The anchor of our will is self-knowledge: knowing and understanding of who we are and why we are here. His anchor must have been freshly shattered, and he then took the reckless option of building a construct which exists for the sake of believing its own untruths as Loki laid out for it. Do you not see how dangerous that is?”

“No. Why?”

“Because if a liars’ palace has stronger certainty of self than the mage behind it, there is no way to be rid of it when its done serving its purposes.”

Tony’s eyebrows raised. “Oh. That... that doesn’t sound good.”

“It truly isn’t. Compound that with the reality-distorting effects of the visions and revelations from the tesseract that Erik Selvig described-” Strange’s face fell. “Oh, god.”

“What?”

“Do you know what had to be done to repair the damage to Selvig’s mind?”

“Cognitive recalibration. He got hit on the head really hard.”

Strange shook his head. “That loosed him from the scepter’s control, not the influence of the madness behind it. It took the work of myself and a pair of talented telepaths to carefully remove it all, but the process was not––it was not painless. Far from it, in fact. It buries roots too deeply, too subtly. It takes more than a single sharp shock to make the mind recognize where it ends and deception begins. It has to be burned out.”

Tony considered. “Loki had a lot more one-on-one time with the tesseract than Selvig did.”

“Yes.”

“What about...” the inventor hesitated, his eyes narrowed. “The structure of the liars’ palace he showed me was like a shell, or a  mask. It hid things under it, kept them locked down and separate.”

Strange’s brow furrowed. “Unusual.”

“Not if he was trying to keep other things separate too. It looked like a... a shield. Or an offering, I guess.” He winced. Dreams never conformed to the vocabulary of waking easily. “It looked like something to hide behind, or under.”

“It might be possible,” Strange said slowly, “that creating a liars’ palace served purposes for him other than safely lying to a creature such as Thanos. If he were talented enough, and mad enough, he might have managed to keep most of himself free of distortion, if he let it consume the palace, and kept the rest of himself properly sealed away.”

“Still doesn’t answer the question as to why he’s popping up suddenly. Natasha mentioned last week that she was pretty sure he’d dropped in on a dream or two of hers.”

“We were as gentle with Selvig as possible, in trying to repair him,” Strange murmured. “Do you believe that Asgard’s treatment of a criminal and traitor of Loki’s caliber would be equally careful?”

And suddenly, Tony felt like he was starting to get it.

 

~~

 

“Oh. You’re back.”

Loki found himself, for this dream, in the middle of Stark’s private lab.

Tony himself was in the middle of working over one of his suits. He shook his head a moment. “I hadn’t noticed I was even dreaming. Must’ve fallen asleep in the lab again. Pepper’ll-” He stopped then, winced as remembrance of reality set in. _No. No she won’t. She doesn’t drop by the lab anymore, now._ “Never mind.” He cleared his throat, feeling a bit exposed under the trickster’s knowing stare. A glance out of the corner of his eye showed Pepper and himself arguing, mid-breakup last month, on one of the monitors. Tony reached out, flicked it off, and shot Loki a glare.

The god raised both hands in a gesture indicating harmlessness, which was perhaps the greatest unspoken lie Tony had ever seen.

“Yeah, yeah, I know that wasn’t you, but you didn’t have to pay attention.”

“I’m an inherently curious creature. It’s part of being a mage. You, of all people, should know that.”

“Should I?”

“Magic and science are one and the same, where I come from.”

“Where you were born, or where you were raised?”

Loki’s upper lip curled for a moment in a sneer, and he snapped, “Both, if you must know.”

“How’s the fire, by the way?”

The trickster winced again, his expression darkening dangerously. “What?”

“I figured it out. Why you’re here. Well, why you’re wandering around being curious about things. How long have you been up to this, by the way? It’s been months. I’m presuming earth was low on your ‘potentially an amusing distraction’ list. Running out of other options, I take it?”

Loki strode closer, until his legs were mere inches from Tony’s knees where the inventor perched on the edge of one work-table. “It’s much harder to ignore while discussing it so directly,” he said slowly, through gritted teeth.

Tony thought about that for a long moment. “How in control were you, in New York? How much of that was you?”

“I could have stopped it, and did not. I am not so self-sacrificing as that. I leave that to Thor, as he is far better suited for it.”

The inventor nodded. “You accept responsibility, then.”

“For my actions, yes. For anything more: no, not at all.”

“Not a bad policy. You don’t exactly look repentant.”

“Nor do you.”

Tony’s lips twitched into a half-smirk he couldn’t help. “Well. I’m not looking for forgiveness. Only victims can offer forgiveness, and most of our victims are dead.”

Loki hummed. “Most. But not all.”

“I’m taking care of those I can find, when I find them.” Tony shrugged. “Yours too, where the shit in New York is concerned. The others feel like we failed them, so they keep track of it.”

“Convenient.”

“If you had any guilt, I’d suggest you let that assuage it.”

“Guilt is as pointless as redemption is illusory.” There was visibly less pain and tightness around Loki’s expression now, like he had been able to relax.

His words made Tony’s heartbeat speed up a little, because they voiced his own thoughts, that he’d been keeping bitten back for years since that cave in Afghanistan. “Yeah,” he said quietly.

“You make a good show of earning it from storytellers, though,” Loki mused. “You play hero. You keep friends. You save lives. And for what?”

“Keeps things interesting. Challenging.”

“Keeps people from noticing just how much control you really have over the world, not just by means of your company and economic matters,” Loki said softly. “How deeply are you embedded in most weapons’ systems around this little planet, I wonder? How little effort would it take you to seize them, with how few starting materials could you still manage it? I have no doubt that you could impress.”

“I don’t need to rule the world,” Tony said simply.

Loki’s eyes flickered. “No. I suppose you don’t.”

“Thrones are cages. Better a flimsy CEO’s cage than any political ones, especially democratically elected. Total mess.” He realized suddenly just how close Loki was still standing. The thought _I could reach out and touch_ crossed his mind.

“I never truly desired a throne, for similar reasons.”

“I had a feeling. Why’d you let us catch you, after you successfully lost?”

“For much the same reason I am here,” Loki said. “Freedom from some cages must be earned slowly, through patience and pain and madness.”

“Yeah.” Tony couldn’t help the faint pang of disappointment he felt when Loki pulled back, and began to walk away. “Curiosity satiated, then?”

“Never. Not until I am dead, I should hope,” Loki responded. “But I need to return to my body for a time, lest I lose the ability to find my way back to it.”

“That’s gotta suck.”

Loki shot him a glance over his shoulder briefly. “You have no idea.” Then he vanished.

 

~~

 

A month passed with no sign of Loki. None of the others had reported any dreams of him. It seemed likely that the trickster had moved on. If Tony felt at all vaguely insulted by that, he sure as hell wouldn’t be caught dead saying so.

He’d kept up lucid-dream practice. It was fun, anyway.

Tonight he dreamt of fog. He had the vague impression that he was in a forest somewhere, halfway up a mountain. It was calm and still and cold, and the fog was heavy. Tony could see his breath make it swirl. He sat on a log, feeling oddly peaceful, until he heard something off toward his left: footsteps, slightly heavy and weary-sounding, and the shifting of heavy clothes and... metal?

He couldn’t make out more than the other man’s vague silhouette until Loki crashed down heavily, to sit beside him. He looked paler and more gaunt than before, almost skeletal, and dried blood made strange patterns around his eyes and down his face, over skin that had a peculiar sheen, like it had blistered and cracked by something. Not like tears: but like someone had tried to wash away tears with acid. The smell of smoke, burnt skin and blood hung heavily around him.

Tony stared, not sure how much was illusion, whether he was being tricked. So he said nothing, at first, and just waited.

“I could not leave so easily. It had been too long since I last returned,” Loki said, his voice a faint rasp. His lips were dry and cracked.

“You look like hell.”

“I look the way my body felt when I woke.”

That didn’t bode well at all.

“I didn’t get a look at myself, or I have little doubt that I would appear still worse,” Loki added, and tried to shrug.

It took a bit of effort, but Tony forced himself to recall the way Loki had looked last time, and reached out without moving.

Loki’s eyes locked onto his. “What are you doing?”

“My dream. My rules.” The world twisted a bit.

The trickster made a low, agonized noise, curling forward, arms locked across his own waist. “Stop that.”

“Let go.”

“Not until you tell me what you’re doing.”

“Helping.”

Loki swore at him.

Tony reached out, rested a hand on the back of the god’s neck, his fingers winding up a bit tangled in Loki’s wild hair in the process. “Hey. Trust me.”

“Laughable.”

“I’m not fond of torture, okay? Personal reasons.”

Loki took a deep breath, and let go, just a fraction at first, then still further. He let the impression Tony had been pushing sink into him like any other aspect of a dream. It didn’t affect his mind overmuch, or their surroundings at all, but the pain lessened. After a few moments, he realized that the burning of the skin around his eyes, down his jaw and neck, had stopped, and his throat felt less like he’d swallowed a desert.

And Tony Stark was still touching him, for some reason.

“Better?”

Slowly, Loki lifted his head enough to shoot Tony a wary glare. “Why?”

“I don’t like being reminded of my own pain, either. It gives me bad dreams, when the dreams themselves aren’t, ah, interrupted as they are now.”

The trickster considered that, and nodded. Then he caught Tony’s wrist when the inventor started to pull his hand away. Ignoring the annoyed noise Tony made, Loki examined the inventor’s hand curiously, noticing faint scars, callus, and other marks of an active, creative life. “Perhaps you are _too_ distracting.”

Tony looked surprised, stunned even, but it faded quickly, replaced by a slightly manic, but overall lascivious grin. “I have not yet begun to distract.”

“Really?” Loki smirked a bit in return, leaning further into Tony’s space, guiding Tony’s captured hand to his waist. “Show me.”

“Get rid of your armor, and I’ll consider.”

Loki vanished it with a flick of the wrist, at the same time he reached out to alter their surroundings drastically.

Not that Tony was going to quite complain about finding himself pinned back against one of his work tables by Loki’s hips, when all Loki was left wearing was a loose, tunic-like undershirt, and the usual distracting leather pants. “This escalated quickly,” he panted.

“Complaints?” His lips brushed Tony’s.

“Not yet,” the inventor countered, and caught that distracting mouth in a kiss.

It went fast from there: clothes all but torn away piece by piece, hands everywhere and that _mouth_. Tony had no doubt he’d be dreaming about that mouth for a long while whether Loki kept making these appearances or not. The trickster’s lips, teeth and tongue took up all of his attention for a long while, as they kissed and their hands wandered and groped and ripped. Then it trailed down his neck and Tony might have made an embarrassing noise when he found one spot that––god, it’d taken Pepper more than three weeks to first find that spot, early on, and just–– _god._

Then, once their clothes were gone, Loki’s mouth moved lower, and lower still, and Tony had to lean back heavily on the lab table to keep from falling off of it because-, “Shit, fuck, holy motherfucking glorious yes don’t stop fuck, Loki, not fucking fair your fucking _mouth_!” He then lost track of words entirely for a long while, especially as Loki slid two well-lubricated fingers into him and started to drag them back and forth across his prostate with merciless precision and maddening patience.

Then it all stopped and Tony was left boneless and wanting and _shaking_ for a few long moments as Loki pulled himself back up to his feet. Then the trickster growled, “Turn for me, Tony Stark.”

Not needing to be told twice, Tony suddenly found strength enough within himself to comply, turning his back to Loki without hesitation, because really, not even Loki was cruel enough to give that _good_ with the intention of killing or maiming him. Loki’s lips on the back of his neck confirmed, as did the hands running slowly up and down his thighs. Then Loki gripped one of his legs behind the knee, guiding it forward, until it, along with Tony’s hands where he leaned on them, provided another anchor-point on the table.

Loki sucked in a breath. “Do you know how delectable you look like this, wide open for me?” Then his cock pressed against Tony’s entrance, guided by his free hand while the other gripped Tony’s hip.

Tony couldn’t stifle a low moan, even as the burn threatened to make him wince. Loki was gifted. It’d been a long, long time since he’d done this and Loki was bigger than most of his past lovers he’d let have him like this. It ached, but there was something blissfully indecent about the stretch that sent a flash of heat up through him. He arched back, pressing his hips closer, seeking more. “God, Loki.”

A blissed-out, snarling hiss was the only response from the trickster at first, as his hand tightened its grip on Tony’s hip. Loki reflected that it had been far too long since he’d had this––willing flesh pressed flush against his, a willing body to lose himself into.

“Move, please, fuck me,” Tony groaned, after a few more breathless seconds.

Loki obliged: impatient and ungentle and _deep_.

The inventor cried out at the first few thrusts, then began muttering utterly filthy words of encouragement, along the lines of: _harder, fuck, deeper there, make me feel it, fuck, Loki, god yes PLEASE_.

And the trickster didn’t disappoint, pace picking up speed, but never losing depth, focusing his entire being on hitting hard right where he could feel the impact make Tony’s entire body weaken against his for a moment at the pleasure that rolled out from it. With every thrust into that tight heat, with Tony’s hips rolling back to meet him, Loki felt himself getting further lost in the sheer physicality of it: touch and heat and closeness and pleasure.

It was several minutes before Loki quite realized that Tony’s litany of profane praise had gotten steadily more repetitive, and that the inventor was asking him for something.

“Your hand, please, fuck, can barely keep my balance with you––AH FUCK––that, don’t stop, fuck, ah, but please touch me, so close, I need-” Then he cut off with a choked noise as Loki curled a hand around his cock.

“Now come for me,” the trickster hissed, as he began to stroke in time with his thrusts. He moaned as how he felt Tony’s body tighten around him, against him, beginning to shake. “Let me see you break.”

Tony broke with a cry, coming hard, clinging to the dream when he felt it growing thin, almost dropping him into wakefulness.

Loki clung to him, too, his pace now less controlled as he fucked Tony through his orgasm and just past it into near-painful aftershocks, until the trickster came to his own climax, biting down on Tony’s shoulder to muffle his own cries.

For a long moment, there was just breathing.

“Suitably distracting?” Tony managed, after a minute or two to catch his breath.

“Mmm. Yes. I do believe you have to wake now, however.”

“You’re kidding me. I could sleep way longer, after that. Hey, wait a second-”

“Effect may linger physically, yes.”

“Don’t sound so amused. Jeez, that bite-mark is gonna be-” He cut off when Loki tugged at his chin, tilting his head up and to the side until the trickster could lean down again to kiss him, hard and thorough.

“Thank you, Tony,” he purred.

Then Tony woke up, staring at his ceiling and feeling sticky, slightly sore, and very, very fucked-out. “What... the fuck was that?”

 

~~

 

After the fourth week of getting fucked by, or fucking, Loki almost every other night, skipping a few days now and then when Loki had to make reluctant pilgrimage back to his body, Tony decided he might have something of a problem on his hands.

Mostly, he realized it when the sex, instead of transitioning into waking, had turned into lengthy discussions of intergalactic politics where the Kree and Skrulls were concerned, several things Loki could have done before the battle of New York that would have worked out far better from a world-domination perspective, chaos as a force in the universe at least as powerful as gravity when handled correctly, and Loki giving a description of chaos and the power of will in affecting the universe through certain sorts of magic. It had been––really damned fascinating.

 _Loki_ was fascinating. And a really good fuck. And utterly insane, and terrifyingly brilliant, and utterly gorgeous as a bonus.

Tony had woken up and reached out across the bed, getting an armful of empty sheets. He’d felt––well, something he hadn’t bothered putting a name to because it was so unpleasant and had only really happened to him for about a month after the break-up with Pepper.

Come to think of it, that feeling had stopped just about the same time Loki had made his first dream-cameo.

Rubbing a hand over his face, Tony muttered, “Well, shit.”

 

~~

 

Then Loki vanished again. For over a month, this time.

Just over two months, in fact.

Thor then returned from Asgard looking grave and harrowed.

“My brother has escaped imprisonment,” he told the Avengers, not long after arriving in their tower and urging them all to sit with him around the nearest table and chairs, which had happened to be in the oversized breakfast nook.

Tony wished he could say he was surprised. He also wished he could say that he wasn’t worried or concerned or only-half-rationally pissed off. “So?” he asked.

The others offered predictable eye-rolling or noises of outrage, which the inventor was quite content to ignore.

“My father has spent the past months of his incarceration attempting to aid Loki in recovering from his exposure to the tesseract, much as your sorcerer and psychics aided Erik Selvig. My brother’s mind, and the nature of his exposure, made for a more complex problem to be repaired.”

“He wasn’t _that_ insane while he was here. That’s no excuse,” Barton muttered.

“He is not absolved of any responsibility for his actions,” Thor assured. “In fact, he insisted upon that point.”

The others looked a bit surprised at that. Thor noticed that Tony didn’t, and fixed him with a curious look.

“Was he still getting all that burnt out of him, then, by the time he escaped?” Tony asked calmly.

The thunderer’s brow furrowed. “He was not. The last of it was turned to ash several weeks ago, by your reckoning of time. According to Odin, my brother had been... _wandering_ , before then. When he returned to his body, Odin trapped him within it, as he had been merciful enough to refrain from before then, with so much to be done.” He shook his head. “My brother has never dealt well with captivity of that sort.”

“How did he escape?” Natasha asked quietly.

“We know not. We do not even know precisely how long he has been missing. After his mind and body were sufficiently whole and recovered, he was placed in a secure vault below the roots of Yggdrasil. I was sent to consult him, to seek aid against a recently renewed threat against Asgard by the Dark World, but not long into our conversation, he provoked me, and vanished when I reached for his throat.”

“He left an illusion?” Clint barked. “How did no one notice? Aren’t there other mages around there for just that sort of thing?”

“My brother is many terrible things, but he is also the greatest mage Asgard has ever known aside from Odin himself,” Thor warned. “He has woven such convincing illusions more than once before.”

“All the more reason someone should’ve noticed that earlier,” Tony mused. “Unless it was a bluff?”

Thor’s brow furrowed. “What?”

“An illusion that he was an illusion. He managed to make it look and feel like he vanished, long enough to slip past you and out the door,” Tony suggested.

The thunderer’s face reddened. “That was one of Odin’s first theories.”

“You still think he might have swapped places with an illusion earlier, though?” Steve prompted. “Why?”

“Because it was a week before then that a series of thefts, three failed and one successful, occurred in Asgard’s weapons vault,” Thor said solemnly. “I believe my brother may have stolen something terribly dangerous: a gauntlet which once belonged to Thanos. Only one of the gems which gave it power was left in place, the others replaced with false ones, but if anyone could find where the other Infinity Gems have been scattered, it would be my brother.”

 

~~

 

Tony spent ninety-percent of the following week in his lab, not sleeping longer than twenty or thirty minutes at a time every twelve hours or so, and only emerging when his coffee machine down there ran out or he recalled than food is often an important thing to consume. Body-fuel. As an engineer, Tony knew fuel was, at times, a necessity. He just preferred to ignore it and pretend he ran on batteries.

Then Pepper, pretty happily-involved-with-Happy-Hogan Pepper Potts, came down and yelled at him for almost an hour, dragged him into a bathroom and threatened to get help from the others to force him under the shower-head if he didn’t start cleaning himself up that instant.

When he emerged, she sat at his desk with a meal on a tray, and demanded that he eat it. He did so. And not long after, he passed out due to the sedatives she’d laced his drink with, and wasn’t that devious for Pepper, but it wasn’t the first time she’d done it. Not often, ever, but when she decided he’d gone too far, she never hesitated.

So he slept. Deeply. Heavily. Almost dreamlessly.

Almost.

He thought he’d felt hands running through his hair, briefly. He thought he’d heard a voice, just a little too low for him to quite make out the words, but it was a familiar voice, speaking softly and calmly, in such a serious way Tony had been worried by it, and inclined to grab whoever it was by the shoulders and shake them until answers fell out.

But his limbs and eyelids were so heavy. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even make a sound, when he tried.

When he woke up, he reached out instinctively and––that wasn’t empty sheets.

It wasn’t the warm body his muddled not-fully-conscious mind had sought, but it also wasn’t just the usual rumpled sheets, either.

At first, Tony thought it might be a rock. Then, upon closer inspection, he suspected it to be artificially made. It was slightly fibrous, but the fibers were finer than hairs, and the whole thing looked more like crystal than anything else. It gave off a bit of its own light, as well as reflecting and refracting light that hit it, never appearing the same shade for any length of time, and changing shades randomly: _pink, green, red, cyan, orange, yellow, darker green, gold, blue, yellow again, pink again, blue again, red, yellow, green, purple, gold_.

He took it down to the lab.

Thor found him there. “Anthony Stark, are you well?”

“I wasn’t earlier. Better now. Thanks for giving me space, there, I know you’ve got some serious questions.”

“I do.” Thor’s brow furrowed. “You knew of my brother’s condition. You know more than you have let on, I suspect.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

“He visited your dreams?”

“Natasha’s a couple times too, actually.”

“She mentioned it. She suggested you had mentioned only one occasion.”

“Well. Careful omission is a thing I do.” He shot Thor a guarded look. “Considering that the third one wound up involving a lot of sex, along with subsequent ones after that, I decided the others didn’t need to know.” As he’d half-suspected, the god of thunder wasn’t even a little surprised.

Unfazed, Thor merely asked, “What of the second?”

Tony frowned. “Well. I’d had words with Strange after the first one. I’d asked Loki why he was in my dream in the first place, and he wound up giving me a lecture on the fundamentals of how the inside of a brain looks on the astral plane, and how a liar’s palace works, and a couple other things. I went to Strange after that to fill in the rest of the gaps, and he wound up figuring out, and explaining to me, the whole burning-out-of-distortion-and-corruption schtick. So the second dream the night after that we just sort of sniped a bit and he said he had to back to his body for a while.” He shrugged.

Thor’s frown, and brow-furrows, deepened. “Nothing more?”

“Not really. I kept asking him about the whole... thing, so I wasn’t a very good distraction from the pain and all that time, I guess.”

“How many times did he visit you?”

Tony cleared his throat quietly. “Is that important?”

The thunderer’s eyebrows raised slowly, more sardonic than any mortal had yet witnessed from the god of thunder so far this century.

“Right. Not important, I’m glad we agree,” Tony said quickly.

“Anthony Stark, I would know your intentions toward my kin, if you have any.”

Tony startled at that. “Woah, what now? I haven’t seen him in months, dude.”

“Then where did you get that?” Thor nodded at the strange material Tony had been studying with varying degrees of fascination for three hours now.

“Uhm. I found it. Really, I didn’t get it from your brother, if that’s what you––wait, why would you think this was from him? What am I missing?”

“That is a shard of the rainbow bridge.”

Tony’s heart might’ve done something embarrassing like skip a beat. “Uh. What?”

“When did you find this?”

“Digging around in drawers of things we’ve confiscated from villains over the months since you left. Our filing system leaves a lot to be desired, and this is was one of a few things JARVIS was complaining hadn’t gone through the usual scans and procedures for records and sorting,” Tony lied easily. He’d come up with the story not long after he found the thing. “It’s been sitting in that same drawer for ages.”

“How long, JARVIS?” Thor asked.

The inventor quietly did not panic, reminding himself to trust his AI’s judgement.

“In truth, I believe it was picked up by S.H.I.E.L.D. after the battle with your brother in New York,” the AI said smoothly. “When it tested with such peculiar properties, however, Natasha and Agent Barton made the decision that perhaps S.H.I.E.L.D. shouldn’t be trusted with such material right after the tesseract-related incidents and the weapons they had planned to make from it.”

Tony was a little awed by the elegance of that lie, and stared up in surprise for a moment before a prickle of suspicion suddenly made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. “You didn’t mention that, you just said it’d been there for a long while.”

“You didn’t ask,” JARVIS countered.

Thor shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest. “My apologies, Tony. I am merely concerned about my brother. You know more than I where he has been wandering, but it is unfair of me to become suspicious of you because of it. My brother wanders wheresoever he will. It was no manipulations of yours.”

Tony considered that. “I like your brother,” he said quickly, quietly.

“Pardon?”

“I said that I like your brother.” Tony ran a hand over his face. “He’s insane, and he’s a pain in the ass, and he’s terrifyingly astute sometimes, but he’s sort of––fascinating, to me. It’s not healthy, I don’t think, to be fascinated with him, given all the crazy, and the tendency to murder with fairly minimal provocation, but if ‘dangerous’ ever had been, or ever would be, more of a deterrent than an encouragement to me, I really wouldn’t _be_ Tony Stark.” He grimaced a little. “And I think without the crazy, your brother wouldn’t really be _Loki_ , you know?”

Thor’s shoulders relaxed slowly. “You truly have not seen or heard anything of him, since his escape?”

Tony shook his head. “Not a peep.” He shrugged. “I was just a good distraction, for a while, I guess.”

The thunderer considered, glancing down at the shard of rainbow bridge the size of a fat guinea pig, and then up ceiling-ward for a moment. “My brother is not distractible, in general, unless he is wrapped up in something which fascinates him. Over the years, magic has been the only thing which consistently draws him in to the exclusion of all else––much like you and your own magic in these laboratories of yours. None of his past loves, not even while he and Sigyn were still wed, could match that. His concern for Hel, on occasion she might be in genuine danger or distress, came close, but Hel has always been more than capable of handling herself, and it has been centuries since she last required his help in any dire fashion.”

Tony blinked a bit, shaking his head. “I’m hardly magical.”

“I beg to differ,” Thor said, fixing him with a pale stare that made him look genuinely ancient. “You are a mage of Midgard, perhaps the best your world has yet seen.”

“Do me a favor and tell Dr. Strange that, preferably while I can see his face,” Tony shot back, grinning.

Thor shook his head. “Your friend, Miss Pepper, said she had finally gotten you to sleep last night. Did you dream?”

“No,” Tony lied. “Not at all.”

 

~~

 

Not long after Thor finally left him alone in the lab, Tony found himself too restless to get back into his work running tests on what he now knew was a piece of bi-frost. Especially not with the odd feeling he kept getting that he was being watched.

JARVIS’ all-seeing observational eye, he was used to. This... whatever weird other watched-feeling this was, just wasn’t the same at all.

So he retreated back up to his repaired penthouse, taking in the view as he approached his bar, pouring himself a scotch, and nearly jumping out of his skin when Loki appeared out of thin air on one of the barstools looking pale and a bit more scarred than before, but healthy, and very alert. He was also not in full armor: just undershirt and trousers and boots.

He was carrying a staff, though. At least it didn’t have a bloodied spear-blade on it this time around.

“I believe you owe me a drink.”

Tony stared at him for a moment, glancing quickly around the room to establish that this wasn’t a dream––clock on the wall was readable, as were the words on the slightly-scattered stack of papers at one end of the bar, he didn’t recall falling asleep and a surreptitious attempt to adjust his surroundings had no effect at all––then tilted his head a bit to one side. “And If I just have JARVIS set off the alarm, summon the Mark VII suit-” He tapped once bracelet. “-and work on kicking your ass?”

“I’ll teleport away and make your life miserable in various ways for days to come,” Loki countered blithely.

The inventor considered for a long moment. “You come in peace?”

“You’ll have to figure that out yourself, darling. I’d hate to ruin the surprise.”

Unable to stop himself smirking a bit at that, Tony stepped behind the bar. “Any liquor preference? Scotch? Metaxa? Tears of orphans?”

“I shall leave it up to your judgement and experience.”

Tony poured him a Metaxa on the rocks with a dash of pomegranate juice, and a slice of lime, and handed it over.

After vanishing his staff up his sleeve with a gesture, Loki accepted, taking an appreciative sip as Tony stepped back around the bar to join him.

“Good?”

“Quite, yes.”

“And you’re here for what other reasons?”

The trickster smirked a bit, lips curved against his glass as he took another sip. “I need a reason? I’m free of incarceration, now. Perhaps I’m simply bored.”

“If you were just bored, I don’t think you’d help my AI lie to Thor about the present you left in my bed,” Tony countered.

“ _Very_ bored,” Loki insisted. He looked up with a near-innocent expression when the inventor sidled closer, until the trickster’s knees touched either side of his hips.

“You didn’t miss me?” He set his drink aside, his other hand already trailing up Loki’s thigh, even as the trickster’s expression remained infuriatingly impassive, except the way his pupils dilated slightly. That, at least, kept Tony from stopping, though he hesitated a little when Loki’s eyes fell shut.

Breathing slow and deep, two lungfuls of Tony’s scent before he quite felt able to move forward with his original plans, Loki said simply, “You’re very grounding, I will have you know.”

Tony blinked. “Uh. That’s... I think I can safely say you’re the only one who thinks that, presuming you’re telling the truth.”

The god’s eyes fell open again, scanning the inventor’s face. “Gods are grounded differently than most mortals. Mages in particular.” He still hadn’t touched the mortal, nor made any move toward him aside from accepting a proffered drink, which he sipped from again, then set aside beside Tony’s. “Fascination is the only thing capable of bringing some of us to stillness. Stillness, at times, is necessary to recover from certain forms of injury: stillness and the manic calm that comes from a worthy puzzle.”

“I’d say ‘manic calm’ is a pretty good term for you, most of the time.”

“Around you, particularly.”

It sunk in, then. Tony stood very still. “You actually like me.”

“I think it fair to say I find myself halfway enamored with you, yes, to my considerable chagrin.” Loki’s expression was a careful mask, despite the near-tenderness of his words. “I’m inclined to ask if I might have you.”

“This won’t be easy.”

“No.”

“You stole a gauntlet?”

“I might have used a few contacts to arrange for it to be stolen, then taken it from thieves who had no idea what they had taken or how to use it.”

“Why?”

“To make Thanos miserable, and to keep him away from Asgard in his raging. There is a god from another galaxy and a very distant and unfamiliar pantheon courting his lady, and he is already seeking out the rest of the gems. I can keep several steps ahead of him, however.”

“This is your vengeance?”

“No, that will come once he believes that he has won.” The trickster’s grin was cruel and burning cold.

“I want in.”

Loki’s eyebrows raised. “Pardon?”

“You want me, then yeah, you have me, but I get hooks sunk in as deep and invasive as yours, or this just won’t work, Loki,” Tony murmured.

The trickster’s tongue darted out to wet his lips. “If you promise to keep up.”

Tony grinned, leaning in close until their lips brushed. “Try me.”


End file.
